Sister Novelists by Devoney Looser

Sister Novelists by Devoney Looser

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2023

For readers of Prairie Fires and The Peabody Sisters, a fascinating, insightful biography of the most famous sister novelists before the Brontës.

Before the Brontë sisters picked up their pens, or Jane Austen's heroines Elizabeth and Jane Bennet became household names, the literary world was celebrating a different pair of sisters: Jane and Anna Maria Porter. The Porters-exact contemporaries of Jane Austen-were brilliant, attractive, self-made single women of polite reputation who between them published 26 books and achieved global fame. They socialized among the rich and famous, tried to hide their family's considerable debt, and fell dramatically in and out of love. Their moving letters to each other confess every detail. Because the celebrity sisters expected their renown to live on, they preserved their papers, and the secrets they contained, for any biographers to come.

But history hasn't been kind to the Porters. Credit for their literary invention was given to their childhood friend, Sir Walter Scott, who never publicly acknowledged the sisters' works as his inspiration. With Scott's more prolific publication and even greater fame, the Porter sisters gradually fell from the pinnacle of celebrity to eventual obscurity. Now, Professor Devoney Looser, a Guggenheim fellow in English Literature, sets out to re-introduce the world to the authors who cleared the way for Austen, Mary Shelley, and the Brontë sisters. Capturing the Porter sisters' incredible rise, from when Anna Maria published her first book at age 14 in 1793, through to Jane's fall from the pinnacle of fame in the Victorian era, and then to the auctioning off for a pittance of the family's massive archive, Sister Novelists is a groundbreaking and enthralling biography of two pioneering geniuses in historical fiction.

Looser, Devoney: - Devoney Looser is Professor of English, Department of English, Arizona State University. She is author of Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850 (2008) and British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820 (2000), co-editor of Generations: Academic Feminists in Dialogue (1997) and editor of Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism (1995).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781635575293
ISBN 10	163557529X
Title	Sister Novelists
Author	Devoney Looser
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing
Year published	2022-10-25
Number of pages	576
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.